I've seen many 3d globes spinning around with day/night shadowing, but the mere inclusion of the sun (however simple, as it is here with a fake lens flare effect) makes it feel so much more real and less uncanny.

The sun totally took me by surprise. I work with folks on other continents and it would be amazing to see a timelapse visualization of check-ins on this thing in relation to the sun.

I created the same thing a while back, but using the following globe: http://www.chromeexperiments.com/globe

I quite liked using the spikes to show traffic volume.

Very cool globe though, love how smooth it is compared to the one I mentioned above & the lens flare!!!

Very cool. Just gave it a test-drive with my company's domain. It seems visually spectacular and data-rich. Most importantly, the trends feature is logically organized with quick renderings of charts/textual data as needed.

Great work. Might just talk management into signing up for out other domains too!

Not a lot of Team Fortress players on the African continent.

Hey, where are the aliens? I want UFO: Enemy Unknown[1] clone in the browser!

(not to be confused with XCOM: Enemy Unknown[2])

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO:_Enemy_Unknown [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XCOM:_Enemy_Unknown

Argh, the usual webGL problem: "Your browser doesn't support webGL. Sadface :("

... despite webGL working fine in this browser (chrome) in the past...sometimes... ><

[Sometimes it's due to bogus browser detection, but usually that tends to be "chrome OK! everything else FAIL!"]

Do you plan to open source the code used for this visualization ?

It's built with Three.js, which is already Open Source. The actual code they use isn't super difficult to grasp- take a look at the source. Server-side, however, is a whole different ball game.

There's no server side code at all for this - we're planning on open sourcing our labs section as well soon (and doing more labs projects, of course)

How accurate is the seasonality of the earth's tilt?

It's way more accurate than necessary... like seriously crazy

From the source:

    function sunAngle(timeFromNow){
      // Don't try to understand this. It's taken from a NASA thing. I don't know how it works

:)

These guys keep on coming with great looking stuff. Very cool.

well I'm hypnotised

Me too. My mind went into a tangent of space travel and hikers docking in from far off planets. Then I shook myself awake with the reality of it just being web traffic. deep sigh :(

Great! :)

Practical application to be doubted due to bad cost/revenue relation.